Initialement publié en 2000, cet ouvrage défendait l'idée que la nation était une figure centrale de la modernité. Après l'éclatement de l'Union soviétique et de la Yougoslavie dans les années 1990, la décennie écoulée a confirmé cette hypothèse avec la montée des courants indépendantistes en Europe (Ecosse, Flandre...) et la persistance dans le reste du monde de revendications nationalistes (Kurdistan, Tibet...). Vingt-cinq nouveaux Etats ont vu le jour au cours des vingt dernières années, signe éloquent de la vitalité du principe d'autodétermination. Une double perspective guide la réflexion d'Alain Dieclzhoff: comprendre les ressorts cachés (sociaux, culturels) des dynamiques identitaires, du Kosovo à la Catalogne, de la Flandre à la Corse; s'interroger sur la manière dont les sociétés peuvent répondre au défi du pluralisme national. Car aujourd'hui ni le libéralisme, ni le républicanisme, ni le multiculturalisme ne sont à la hauteur des enjeux. Seule la construction d'Etats démocratiques multinationaux serait à même de prévenir l'exacerbation des tentations sécessionnistes.
The history and theory of international law have been transformed in recent years by post-colonial and post-imperial critiques of the universalistic claims of Western international law. The origins of those critiques lie in the often overlooked work of the remarkable Polish-British lawyer-historian C. H. Alexandrowicz (1902-75). This volume collects Alexandrowicz's shorter historical writings, on subjects from the law of nations in pre-colonial India to the New International Economic Order of the 1970s, and presents them as a challenging portrait of early modern and modern world history seen through the lens of the law of nations. The book includes the first complete bibliography of Alexandrowicz's writings and the first biographical and critical introduction to his life and works. It reveals the formative influence of his Polish roots and early work on canon law for his later scholarship undertaken in Madras (1951-61) and Sydney (1961-67) and the development of his thought regarding sovereignty, statehood, self-determination, and legal personality, among many other topics still of urgent interest to international lawyers, political theorists, and global historians.
The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World explores the question of how a culture - a collective consciousness - is born. Gérard Bouchard compares the histories of New World collectivities, which were driven by a dream of freedom and sovereignty, and finds both major differences and striking commonalities in their formation and evolution. He also considers the myths and discursive strategies devised by elites in their efforts to unite and mobilize diversified populations.
ÔThis volume confronts one of the most central issues in the study and practice of bureaucracy. Questions about representativeness of public institutions raises key issues about legitimacy, especially in contexts characterised by ethnic diversity and cleavages. Debates are shaped by normatively informed positions that contrasts those in favour of representativeness with those who point to limitations and side-effects. This volume offers a set of important contributions to these debates by linking the long-standing debates about representative bureaucracy with an impressive range of country studies. This volume is a fundamental contribution to the theme of representative bureaucracy.Õ Ð Martin Lodge, London School of Economics, UK The book explores one of the most topical issues of public bureaucracies worldwide: the relationship between the composition of the public sector workforce and the nature of the society it serves. Taking a comparative and analytical perspective, the authoritatively, yet accessibly written, country chapters show how salient the politics of representativeness have become in increasingly diverse societies. At the same time, they illustrate the wide variety of practice based on different political systems, administrative structures, and cultural settings. Providing comprehensive up-to-date information and analysis, these studies will interest scholars and practitioners alike, from comparative public administration and management, government, public policy, and diversity studies.
The Politics of Belonging represents an innovative collaboration between political theorists and political scientists for the purposes of investigating the liberal and pluralistic traditions of nationalism. Alain Dieckhoff introduces an indispensable collection of work for anyone dealing with questions of identity, ethnicity, and nationalism.
In this richly documented work, Serge Courville tells the geographical history of Quebec from the appearance of the first humans through to the present day. This detailed and erudite book maps major stages of Quebec’s development, providing a geographical record of the many social relationships that over time created a sense of place. Landscape, Courville shows, is the keeper of memory, the record of successive changes, and a witness to the genesis of the new. Places that were once agricultural, then left to waste and ruin, are today revivified by tourism. Areas that now house office buildings were long ago open playgrounds where children ruled. Drawing on vast research, Courville shows how, in spite of the turbulence Quebec often endures – or perhaps because of it – the land itself may be seen as an important participant in the history of its peoples. Quebec: A Historical Geography was originally published by Les Presses de l’Université Laval as Le Québec: Genèses et mutations du territoire.
Click here to read an excerpt from the book. I have long tried to understand why the Arab-Israeli Conflict has not been resolved. Despite many attempts at regional and international negotiations since the time of the Mandate, the Conflict has persisted and the Palestinians still do not have a state. The continuation of the Palestinian question within the more general context of this issue places it at the heart of the Conflict and this is the reason why I centered my analysis on the Israelis and just the Palestinians (instead of all the Arab states in the region). Lack of a solution to the Arab-Israeli Conflict may thus be associated with absence of a state for the Palestinians. My case study begins with a brief introduction to trends in negotiations after which I come to my central research question: Why, despite all these attempts at negotiation had the Arab-Israeli Conflict not been resolved? I had a feeling the problem might have to do with beliefs. That is, both sides to the Conflict held (and some still hold) maximalist beliefs about having the whole of what was mandated Palestine for themselves. Both sides have made advances toward peace but the Conflict continues and the Palestinians still do not have a state. I assumed that unless both sides changed their beliefs regarding territory there would be no resolution to the Conflict. In my view, change was not a matter of eliminating a belief but changing the priority of one belief over another, i.e. to believe in peace instead of believing in having all the land of Palestine. Before developing some ideas about beliefs in the next section, I reviewed some of the literature in international relations that dealt with conflict analysis. Two of the more popular ones are the realist approach and organizational theory. Realist theorists Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz examine conflict in terms of maximizing interests, in particular power. (See Introduction.) Their approaches can explain situations where interests are clear-cut but power cannot always impose itself as is seen by international attempts at negotiation or even Israel’s efforts to impose a solution on the Palestinians. Organizational theory does not necessarily explain situations where state or government bureaucracies don’t exist, e.g. with the Palestinians during the time of the Mandate. I then decided to go ahead and see what beliefs had to offer to conflict analysis. In the section following the realist and organization discussion, I looked at beliefs from the standpoint of belief system theorists in international relations and from the psychological approaches that influenced them. In order to better examine beliefs and be able to use them to explain this Conflict (and perhaps others later), I formulated four questions and then looked at what belief system theorists and psychologists had to say about them: How were beliefs formed, were they consistent with behavior, could they change and if so, how. Two of the major theories in psychology were looked at: Attribution and learning. (See Introduction for more on these approaches.) From these two approaches we can learn much about how beliefs are formed and, in so doing, how they can change. For example, in interpreting incoming information individuals tend to attribute causes to explaining event. This causation process implies some reasoning ability and facilitates learning. One problem with attribution theory is that it indicates what an individual should do but the person is not always so careful in causal analysis. Still, the approach is valuable to understanding beliefs. These theories also highlight the importance of experience, as the past is so often the source of recurrent behavior. For any successful negotiation, communicat
With emphasis on East Asian and North American examples – notably Japan and Quebec – Date, Laniel and their contributors take a new approach to the understanding of small nations and their role in the international system. Small nations, by their very nature, raise significant questions about what a nation is. Some small nations are sovereign states with relatively small populations and limited territory, others are nations within larger sovereign states, with distinctive cultures, governance structures or other features that differentiate them from their “parent” state. By focussing on non-European nations in particular, the contributors to this volume challenge our conceptions of what a small nation is and how it operates within the international system. They focus in particular on the nation-within-a-nation-state of Quebec and on Japan, supplemented by further examples from East Asia. By interrogating what these examples have to show us about the typology and character of small nations, they offer a critique of superpower and draw out the potential of small nation studies. A valuable resource for students and scholars of international relations and theories of the nation and nation state.
